Hacking Democracy

Two US presidential campaigns made a big stir by using the Internet as a two-way medium. The innovators got clobbered by Big Television this time, but the software is open source and ready for the next round.

In July 2002, Lawrence Lessig gave a speech
that challenged technologists to become politically active, to take up the
fight against forces determined to replace the Net's free and open
commons with a plumbing system for content, valved at every juncture
by mechanisms made to manage the digital
rights of industrial
producers. He didn't pull punches:

Now, I've spent two years talking to you. To us. About this. And
we've not done anything yet. A lot of energy building sites and
blogs and Slashdot stories. [But] nothing yet to change that vision
in Washington. Because we hate Washington, right? Who would waste
his time in Washington?

But if you don't do something now, this freedom that you built, that
you spend your life coding, this freedom will be taken away. Either
by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law
we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary
expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over
innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a
world where your freedom has been taken away. And, if you can't
fight for your freedom, you don't deserve it.

But you've done nothing.

Larry was right. Against the RIAA, the MPAA, the
big publishing and broadcasting lobbies and Congress
itself, the good guys were being trounced, repeatedly.

So let's mark that point in time and fast-forward to December 2003,
17 months later. The presidential primary playoffs are about to
begin, and already a Democratic frontrunner has not been chosen on the
strength of his appeal but through the Internet and a variety of tools that
run on the Net.

In an interview with Christopher Lydon, Larry said this:

We're just at the moment when people realize that culture is not
something that has to be fed to them, like the Soviet citizens at
the end of the Soviet empire, where they realize that they can
participate in the construction and sharing of culture. Technology
has given us that opportunity. And the problem now is that the law
takes that away. And so Creative Commons' objective is to find a way
to get the law out of the way, so this extraordinary potential for
human creativity can be realized in the context of this
technology....What we want to do is make it easy for people to
recognize the free culture that is out there for them to build upon,
so that they'll build on that culture.

The “we” in this case isn't only Creative Commons. It's something new
yet familiar: the free culture movement. “Just as Richard Stallman gave
birth to the free software movement”, Larry said, “I think it's fair to
say we're the free software movement for culture.”
And, much like Richard, Larry is quick to make distinctions:

There is an important difference between the free software movement
and the open-source software movement, in that the free software
movement's first goal is freedom. It's not promising better
software. It's not promising a better business model. It's promising
freedom. And I think that's what the free culture movement is about.
It's about giving people the freedom to build and cultivate their
culture.

As with free software, tools matter. “One of the most important
examples” of free culture tools, Larry says, is the Weblog:

Free culture is about the transformation between a broadcast culture
and a procreative culture—from a broadcast culture where the few
speak to the many to a procreative culture where the many speak to
the many. That's what the Internet is supposed to have been about
forever. But blogging is the first time that it happens in the
context of political ideas that get translated and expanded upon as
other people comment on them. In the context of political
campaigns...they become better citizens. They become engaged
citizens. There has been no new technology in the last 150 years
that has produced more engaged citizens.

Larry said all this in late 2003, when Howard Dean
had emerged as the leading Democratic candidate
for president. During the 2003 calendar year,
the Net-centric Dean campaign started from nowhere,
raised record sums of money, involved record numbers
of people and made its candidate a frontrunner in
the polls as well as the purse. When it was over,
and John Kerry ran away with the Democratic party
nomination, the mainstream press predictably compared
the Dean campaign to the dot-com bubble. Joe Trippi,
Dean's campaign manager,
voiced what everybody who truly watched the
campaign or participated in it knew intimately:

This was not a dot-com crash. The Howard Dean campaign was a dot-com
miracle. Let's look at this thing. This guy starts...on January 31
of last year with seven people, $157,000 in the bank, 432 known
supporters nationwide....He was an asterisk....How did it happen?
It is a miracle that Howard Dean moved from there to $45 million,
more money than any Democrat in history has raised....He didn't do
it. I didn't do it. You did it.

Politics, Trippi said, was no longer something mediated by the media, no
longer a horse race run and covered exclusively by professionals. It
was, Trippi said, the end of an era that began with the televised
Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960:

It took about five to ten years to realize that was the moment when
television was going to change everything in America's politics.
What no one could've predicted was that it would have become a race
for money, a race to buy a one-way communications tool that would
take the American people essentially out of the process. It was no
longer about average Americans, it was about, “How do I find a rich
guy to write me a $2,000 check and then how do I take that money and
buy television with it?”

Joe Trippi said all this on February 11, 2004, in his keynote address to
the Digital Democracy Teach-In, an event that opened O'Reilly's Emerging
Technology Conference. That event was an idea I suggested
to the O'Reilly folks at the end of the company's Open Source Convention
in July 2003. It also was my idea to invite Joe Trippi to keynote the
thing. That idea came to me while Britt Blaser, founder of xpertweb.com
and an energetic Dean volunteer, was giving me a tour of
the Dean Campaign headquarters in Burlington, Vermont. I was present in
purely electronic form. My face was on Britt's laptop, my voice was on
his laptop speakers and my eye was a camera mounted on the laptop lid.
My body was in California. It was in this disembodied form that I met
Joe. Walking around holding the laptop like an hors d'oeuvre tray at a
party, Britt ran into Joe in the hallway. After saying hi, I asked Joe
to keynote the February event. To my astonishment, he said yes.